Thumbs up for Relax and Recover (REAR). I just got this installed on a couple of our physical services (most are virtual). You can do a 100% bare metal recovery with REAR and that is something that has always me nervous about our physical servers. The backup target can be a number of different things. It can be an attached USB drive, a remote NFS server, a remote Bacula server, and lots of other options.
Sure, we have backups of data, but to completely rebuild an OS, reconfigure it and put all the data back in place is a pain in the rear on the best day. With this system, you can just reboot a working system and choose Relax and Recover from the boot mode or burn a CD and boot from that (which is necessary in the case of a hard drive failure or something.). You can restore the entire machine pretty easily. This makes me sleep a little better knowing that our VoIP server and primary DHCP/DNS servers are backed up in such a way that I can restore those entire machine in a matter of minutes, rather than hours to rebuild and then restore from backups. Chris P.S. I do have to acknowledge that REAR is not the same thing as long term archiving, but it could be used for that purpose. You can even backup to tape for those that are into that sort of thing... On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 7:21 PM, Kent Perrier <[email protected]> wrote: > If you want to look at bare-metal restores, take a look at > http://relax-and-recover.org/ > > Red Hat just included this in RHEL. > > Kent > > On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 6:49 PM, Howard White <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 05/17/2016 05:44 PM, Michael L wrote: >> >>> That sounds like something I would like to try. I'm thankful for >>> getting to be on this email list. >>> M >>> >>> >> Michael, >> >> Your original post speaks to a broad topic that gets short shrift in most >> circles because backup is boring. And try as we might, the backups we _do_ >> make are never enough. >> >> First point, the term "backup" is ambiguous. >> >> Second point (to which you originally alluded), backup != archive. >> >> Let's take a swing at the difference. Backups are about providing >> recovery for an information system. Archives are about replicating, >> indexing and preserving data. >> >> So you need to ask yourself: self, what to I expect to accomplish with >> these [ backups | archives ]. There are four reasons to backup and even >> more reasons to archive. >> >> B1 - hardware failure, and not just hard drives. >> B2 - software failure, and not just operating system or applications. >> B3 - security failure (can you say crypto-locker?) >> B4 - human failure, and not just rm -rvf / >> >> Bacula is a terrific backup solution that I have never had the patience >> to get to work; I am jealous of Ben and Steven Critchfield for their >> abilities to get that system working. I personally have an instance of >> BackupPC running but it could use an upgrade and some verification >> testing. Neither of these are truly archives. >> >> Oh, but you want to do a bare metal restore? A bare metal restore is an >> operation by which one may take a backup "volume" and through the magic of >> television cause a new instance of a given system to be running. Personally >> for that requirement, I take images of critical systems with Clonezilla. A >> Clonezilla image allows me to create a system instance even though I may >> have to overlay critical data from other backups to complete a recovery. >> >> Oh wait! You've got databases?? Add a whole 'nother layer of storing >> journals and database unloads to your plan. Databases may be complex data >> storage systems that are not so easy to replicate. >> >> Having fun yet? >> >> Howard >> >> >> -- >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "NLUG" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected] >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en >> >> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "NLUG" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. 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